Lack of joy from music

Have you ever met someone who just wasn’t into music? They may have a condition called specific musical anhedonia, which affects 3 to 5% of the population. Researchers at the University of Barcelona and the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital — The Neuro have discovered that people with this condition showed reduced functional connectivity between the regions of the brain responsible for processing sound and the regions related to reward. “These findings not only help us to understand individual variability in the way the reward system functions, but also can be applied to the development of therapies for treatment of reward-related disorders, including apathy, depression, and addiction,” says Dr. Robert Zatorre, a neuroscientist at The Neuro and one of the paper’s co-authors. (The Neuro)